Newport, OR
On the central Oregon coast at Yaquina Bay, two miles south of downtown Newport. Single 5,398ft runway 16/34, uncontrolled, 100LL/Jet-A. The Oregon Coast Aquarium and the Yaquina Head Lighthouse (1873) are both within five miles. Newport's commercial fishing fleet is the largest on the Oregon coast — Dungeness crab, tuna, and pink shrimp leave from the harbor under the Yaquina Bay Bridge, a 1936 cantilever-arch designed by Conde McCullough that is itself on the National Register. The approach to 16 takes you over the bridge.
A 682-foot basalt butte in downtown Eugene, named for Eugene Skinner (the city's founder, who built his 1846 cabin at its base). Now a city park with a paved road to the summit, a basalt-column climbing wall, and a flagpole that's been a Eugene landmark since 1859. The view from the top covers the entire central city — campus, downtown, the Willamette River — and on clear days the Coast Range to the west. The butte's northeast side is a columnar basalt outcrop popular with local climbers; the city built a maintained climbing wall there in the 1990s.
The most storied track-and-field venue in the United States. Built in 1919 for the University of Oregon football team and converted to a track facility in 1921, Hayward has hosted seven US Olympic Trials and is the spiritual home of American distance running — Steve Prefontaine's home track, the Bowerman Mile, the place where Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman cooked up Nike. Completely rebuilt in 2020 with a striking timber-and-glass cantilevered grandstand designed by SRG Partnership, the new Hayward is now also a championship indoor venue. Houses the Bowerman Athletic Building and a track-and-field museum.
A 2,058-foot forested butte at the southern edge of Eugene, the highest point in the city's parks system and the dominant green hill on Eugene's southern skyline. The summit trail is a half-mile, 700-foot climb that pops out above the trees onto a bare basalt knob with 360° views — the entire Willamette Valley north, the Coast Range west, the Cascades east, and on clear days both Mount Jefferson and the Three Sisters. A favorite local hike, busy on weekends, but quiet weekdays. The butte's shape from the air is distinctive: a near-perfect green dome rising 1,200 feet above the valley floor.
Land at McMinnville and walk across the road to stand under the largest wingspan of any aircraft ever flown. The Hughes H-4 Hercules — the "Spruce Goose," though it's actually Duramold birch plywood, not spruce — was Howard Hughes's wartime answer to the U-boat: a flying boat big enough to carry troops across the Atlantic above the torpedoes. It was finished too late for the war, and it flew exactly once: November 2, 1947, Hughes himself at the controls, half a mile at 25 feet over Long Beach Harbor, about 30 seconds. Then he kept it in a climate-controlled hangar with a full maintenance crew until he died. Its 320-foot wingspan held the record for the widest aircraft ever flown until the Stratolaunch in 2019. After years beside the Queen Mary in Long Beach, it was barged up the coast and the Columbia and Willamette rivers in pieces and rebuilt here, opening to the public in 2001. The museum around it holds 150-plus aircraft and spacecraft, an SR-71 Blackbird, and a Titan II missile.